


Passage

by mystiri1



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Community: song_prompt, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-22
Updated: 2011-04-22
Packaged: 2017-10-18 12:11:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/188766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mystiri1/pseuds/mystiri1
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Time is the longest distance between two places.  ~Tennessee Williams</p>
            </blockquote>





	Passage

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Traxits](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Traxits/gifts).



> For the prompt: Author's choice, author's choice, [Time](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0kGAz6HYM8) \- Hans Zimmer

She has always been aware of the sea, around her, under her – it laps at her sides in lazy, careless waves, lifts her up in powerful tidal surges – but this is different. Now she feels it in other places; it presses against her shields, tries to tug her in the direction of its choosing, but she sinks resolutely downwards, seeking the location on Lantea's seabed the Council has chosen as her resting place. It takes powerful anchors to hold her there because the shields still hold a lot of air within, even though they've been deliberately reconfigured for this. Her structure shudders slightly as she reaches the bottom and the anchors lock on, disturbing the seabed in order to reach the bedrock beneath.

All of her sensor profiles have changed. The quality of light is... different when filtered through the mass of water and the currents of the ocean are more constant, persistent, than the changeable currents of the air. She starts recording, creating a baseline analysis to work with in case of difficulties, while inside her walls the bustle of activity continues.

She knew it was coming. The messages that bounced back and forth within her systems, the carefully detailed plans for evacuation, plans she has assisted with – but for all that she was aware of it, until it happens, she doesn't realise what it means. She could blame the sinking for that, the sudden reordering of so many of her basic functions for another purpose, or perhaps some faulty logic routine somewhere, but it's only when the last of them has stepped through the _astria porta_ and the city is empty that she _realises_.

She is alone. She knew what evacuation meant, but no carefully-documented plan is sufficient to convey the sudden reality of _solitude_.

There is still the hum of busy subroutines, the soft vibration of machinery working at this task or that – but no other thoughts brush up against hers, arrow their way through various databases and programmes in inquiry/initialisation/communication. No footsteps move in measured patterns along her halls. The city is silent.

Time passes. She shuts down certain subroutines as no longer necessary, because there are no people to feed. The gardens die off, and the air quality changes slightly – but not much, because there is nobody here to breathe it. Other databases, only nominally a part of her, shut themselves down from lack of use. It gets... quieter.

It has been nearly three thousand years ( _2,937 years, 183 days, 17 hours, 43 minutes and nineteen seconds_ ) when she decides that the shields need to be pulled in slightly to prevent power draining too quickly. It is only the outlying areas at stake, and they do not hold anything vital to her continued existence as her core programming is held securely in the tower at the city's heart, but it is almost as startling a change as the day she first sank. Yes, parts of her structure have been flooded before – there are the surge pools, and the ballast tanks – but these are hallways that people have walked down, rooms that people have lived in, and the pressure of water feels strange against her sensors, wrong in a way that makes her want to correct it immediately. But if she does not draw the shields inward, then her power supply might be dangerously depleted before her residents return.

At four thousand years, she notes that some of the smaller, sea-based lifeforms making their homes in those same halls appear to have mutated slightly. It is possibly the effect of residual piezoelectrical signals, because she still has some functioning crystals in the area, and salt water is highly conductive. She thinks that it would make an interesting research subject, particularly if this mutation continues to evolve, but all of the researchers are gone. She makes a note of it in one of the biological sciences database – restarts it specifically for that purpose – but afterwards, shuts it back down again, because all power must be reserved for maintaining the shields.

At five thousand years, a new thought occurs. It is one she does not believe she ever would have come up with before, but in the absence of all other inputs she has nothing to do now but think about subjects of her own choosing. That, and shut down more programmes and subroutines, switch various maintenance functions to standby mode, draw the shields in a little farther. And the thought is this: _they are not coming back_.

She subjects it to rigorous screening, because surely it is incorrect. Her logic circuits list all of the evidence for and against: the lifespan of an Alterran while in a carbon-based form versus the enduring nature of one who has ascended and therefore transformed into an energy state – and yet, an Ascended Alterran is still quite capable of returning to her halls, interfacing with her circuits and assuring her that she is not alone, and nobody has done so. Perhaps the enemy followed, perhaps disease has wiped them all out, perhaps-

When she considers it logically, there are millions of things that could have gone wrong. While she has an inherent faith in her creators – she was not built to question them, after all – logic suggests that they, too, are fallible and potentially finite. After 732 years, 276 days, 3 hours, 23 minutes and 47 seconds of debating this possibility, she reaches a new decision.

The shields are pulled further inwards. New subroutines are written and activated. And finally, she does something she has never done before: she places herself in standby mode. It means she will not have these disturbing thoughts to contemplate, and it will save more power for the shields.

Stand-by mode is a little like making herself wilfully blind and deaf, but it is silent in a way the city halls are not, because now she cannot even hear _herself_ thinking. Time ceases to pass, while the shields are automatically pulled in at regular intervals, halls flooding in their wake. She sleeps, unaware.

And when she wakes, it is slow, sluggish, because she was never really designed to shut down in such a way. But she cannot miss the sudden feeling of _other_ when it brushes up against her, startles cold circuits into life. One of her people has returned, and it takes some time ( _6 minutes and 51 seconds_ ) for her to realise that MajorJohnSheppard both is and is not one of her own. His thoughts are too different. He has never stepped foot inside her halls before. Analysis suggests almost direct descent from a genetic source that is recorded in her databases, however, so she promptly designates him as a full citizen with all the access privileges that entails.

There are other life forms with him, many that she cannot touch at all, but others that hold a faint echo of that familiarity. For the first time in millennia the city is no longer silent but the words they speak to each other are strange, foreign and disconcerting.

This was not how she hypothesised any return would go.

Worse is that almost immediately, it becomes obvious that her attempts at conserving power have been inadequate. Now that she is aware again, her internal clock informs her that it has been 10,087 years, 113 days, 8 hours, 19 minutes and 32 seconds since the city was evacuated. The shields are failing and more of her halls have flooded than she initially realised, her sensors relaying incomplete or corrupted data due to erosion and wear. The power sources these new residents have brought with them are insufficient to halt the collapse. Her eager welcome of MajorJohnSheppard and his companions has accelerated the process and although she wants to protest when he steps back through the _astria porta_ – she already has a subroutine running an analysis of their language, as they do not appear to fully understand her own, but it is being delayed by the fact that they appear to be speaking at least 13 different languages that she has counted so far, not including dialectal peculiarities, and the analysis is made more difficult by the fact that some of them are not using their unique languages for conversational purposes at all – she instead turns her attention to remedying the problem.

She is grateful when he does return, and even brings more with him – natives of this galaxy, not her people but still _people_ to fill her empty halls – but it makes the necessity of finding a solution all the more urgent. They are talking, now, of how to return the city to the surface, and she _knows_ that she must know how, but maybe the answer is hidden within one of those programmes or databases that have been shut down or lost to the encroaching water; perhaps it is lost to her forever, and soon her new people will be, too, and the city will be silent forever, home only to those sea creatures with the mutated bio-electric signatures that she noted several millennia before. She cuts off power to more and more parts of the city, and wonders if, in the process, she is sabotaging her hopes of finding the answer, long-forgotten.

It is chance that saves them, and a part of her that wonders how much she, herself, has degraded and eroded over the years, even while her core was held safely behind the shields; is quietly disgusted that it never occurred to her. In her haste to shut down all the power consumption she could, she cuts the power to the anchors that hold her to the ocean floor, and the city moves (lurches awkwardly, ungracefully) for the first time in millennia. At first it is merely in response to the tugging of the ocean currents, but then it is upward as water slips beneath her, between her hull and the seabed, and lifts.

She starts pumping the ballast tanks out to compensate for those parts of her which are flooded, feels it working as she surges upwards. Several structures buckle and collapse under the abrupt shift in pressure, and there is slight north-east drift, but then she breaks the surface. Water is streaming down her walls as the shields flicker and die, but the current that winds around and through the maze of her towers now is the wind, and sunlight pours through her windows. Inside, she can hear the newcomers cheering and celebrating. They are safe.

She continues to make adjustments, as water is now retreating from many of the flooded areas, and the ballast needs to be readjusted accordingly, plus there is still some drift occurring. But she pauses in her calculations when MajorJohnSheppard steps out onto a balcony, apparently for no other purpose than to look out over the city, at the sea and sky that surrounds him. She can sense the wonder/contentment/pleasure he feels at doing so, and takes a moment of her own. She notes the exact feel of the wind as it moves over her surfaces, the tug of ocean currents below, the way the waves lap at her sides. For a brief moment she compares it to the memory of how it had felt before, but then decides the historical data is irrelevant when viewed against how it feels _now_ , after waiting so long. She tries to convey this to MajorJohnSheppard, but he does not appear to understand her attempt at communication.

She will have to work on that.

But he does rest one hand against the wall – warm, temperature and heartbeat and respiration all within normal parameters, alive and other and _here_ – and Atlantis thinks that for now, this is enough, even if he cannot fully understand her the way his ancestors could.

For now, this is perfect.


End file.
